Bob Morris Takes on COP 11 (edition 3)

Bob COP 11 Dispatch No. 3
Bob Morris, Montreal, Dec. 3, 2005


Last night was the first chance I had to attend the Sierra Club Canada, Sierra Club U. S. organizational meeting. It was both interesting and enlightening, but first I want to cover what has happened today.

I struck up a conversation with the man from National Oceanic and Atmosperic Administration (I’m not sure about that title, but anyway, he was from NOAA, the weather people). He started to give party line answers about more research needs to be done and areas of uncertainty, but I don’t think his heart was in it because when I asked what research they were doint to resolve their uncertainty he told me that was a big problem because they just got their budget two weeks ago and they took big cuts.

We agreed that this was a bad time to be cutting funding on climate research, when another man came up and my new friend from NOAA introduced me to Trey Trigg, a member of the U. S. climate change negotiating team. We quickly established that Trey, who was also a member of the U. S. team at Kyoto, could easily out acronym me. As I querried him regarding the distance between the U. S. position on climate change and the rest of the world’s, he tossed me the old line that the rest of the world and the science were just too far ahead of the American people for the government to take a stronger position and that the American people weren’t ready to cut emissions by 36% in eight years (his claim of what Kyoto would require). He was nonplussed when instead of disagreeing with him I said that Sierra Club was ready to help him remedy that problem by building grassroots support for a new energy economy based on clean power and climate protection. We parted as possible allies, with me encouraging him to think about how we could work together on our common goal, because Mother Nature doesn’t care about politics and we needed to get emission reductions going soon.

Next was the big march of at least 100,000 (my guesstimate) people calling for action beyond Kyoto from the rest of the world and admonishing the U. S. delegation to get out of the way of progress. Very orderly, icy cold and windy; I handed out flyers along the march but skipped the speeches at the end in deference to my cold. I came inside for my Dayquil, latte and to write this report. (Note : Canadians are very polite and nice about taking a proferred flyer on the street compared to people in D. C. and none of the flyers seemed to end up on the ground.

Now back to last night’s SCC and SCUS organizational meeting : those Canadians are all over this stuff! Three of Canada’s 16 voting delegates are SCC members. Elizabeth May and her team of extraordinarily sharp, mostly young volunteers have been working on this since Kyoto and are acknowledged by the Canadian Forign Minister (who is President of this whole conference and with whom they met and had substantive discussions yesterday) to be more knowlegeable than the Canadian government. They can acronym right up there with Trdy Trigg and are an active part of forming the Canadian positions on 3.9 and, article 10 (the new one) and other madly obscure but highly important negotiating points. Fred Huett is providing them with wise counsel regarding the need to not count on the U. S. to bow to reason or world opinion and alter their carbon-industry-profit centric position.

The common thread I perceive in all this is that grassroots support in the U. S. is the only force that can generate the needed rapid, orderly movement to a new energy economy based on clean power and climate protection.

Bob Morris Takes On COP 11 (edition 2)

Bob COP 11 Dispatch No. 2
Bob Morris, Montreal, Dec. 3, 2005

Maybe it was the nasty cold that has been gaining ground, or the rain/sleet/snow, or the legion of security officers looking every inch lie the Secret Service people I left behind in D. C., or my problems as a first time user of a French keyboard on an antiquated Apple computer to send out my first dispatch. Whatever the reason by 2:00 PM I was pretty much ready to say that my presence here was not going to be productive and I ought to cut my trip short. I poked my head in a couple of side bar meetings on energy efficiency and a Mexican pilot voluntary emissions reduction program, but I didn’t learn anything that will help Sierra Club enlist humanity or convince our government to make America a world leader in building a new energy economy based on clean power and climate protection.

So I bought some Dayquil, stopped for a latte and thought about Cesar Chavez. Then I went back into the hall and introduced myself to different people (who weren’t busy on cell phones), asked them what they were trying to accomplish here and discussed how we could help each other. Here is what I got:

(First a diversion. Why do people pay a fortune to come to something like this and then spend all their time on cell phones talking with the people who they see every day and who didn’t make the trip? I saw the same thing in my business career: people would drive to get someplace and see a branch of their business and then spend most of the time on the phone talking with their home office, ignoring the real people right in front of them that they traveled to see. Hello! This is not a productive use of time or money.)

Back to reporting. There is a big push for nuclear energy to be revived as a clean, green option. The young, attractive professionals from the unfortunately named Envi Rad Consulting Services tried to convince me that they had solved the operational safety and transport problems by telling me that the people responsible for doing these jobs said that there had been no leakages…well, except for Chernobyl. “The French,” they proudly announced, “are now recycling their waste so there is no more storage problem either.” They were a little short on facts and details as I asked questions and admitted that maybe they were a little naïve when they stated that if there had been problems the responsible authorities would have reported them, but insisted they just needed to work on their “communications skills” and they had the hard science in hand. The irony of having heard the same refrain among fellow Global Warming activists didn’t make their assertion any less scary.

Next I talked to the French guys who had a booth touting their Climate Change initiatives. They confirmed that they had an active recycling program for nuclear waste, but the recovery wasn’t 100% and they couldn’t give me any estimate of how much waste remained after the recycling process. Someone else gave me a flyer saying Dr. Patrick Moore, “co-founder of Greenpeace” was going to give a pro-nuclear talk on Monday. That makes three co-founders of Greenpeace that I have heard about.

I got some good data showing that the external costs of cars in Europe per 1000 passenger kilometers are 76 euro, air is 52.5, bus is 37.7 and rail is 22.9. External costs include accidents, air pollution, up and down stream processes, climate change, noise, nature and landscapes and urban effects. I think you can get the details at WWW.INFRAS.CH.

Ms. Peace at Pew Center for Global Climate Change said we should contact the Pew Trust to help fund our grassroots program to enlist humanity in building a new energy future based on clean power and climate protection. As soon as we get a good plan together I think we should do that. A very pleasant gentleman from Belize with Mainstream Adaptation to Climate Change advised that we form a speakers bureau of the leaders of government, industry and non profits who have led successful initiative to reduce carbon emissions, giving emphasis to progress that is being made. He suggested Ms. Peace from Pew as a candidate.

The man at Sweden’s booth and I talked about the possibility of Sweden and Sierra Club working together to persuade our U. S. government to take a pro-active stance on climate change instead of being an obstacle to progress. We didn’t come up with any concrete ideas, but said we would circulate the idea. I also talked with people from non-profits who were eager to explain very esoteric models of things like “convergence and contraction”, but the more questions I asked the more confused we both got and they usually said that the “real expert” would be there at some future time.

I’ll have to think some more about whether I should stay the week I planned or cut it short. It won’ surprise those who know me that I am impatient with our inability to get the attention of our U. S. delegation. I think we should get a couple of dozen U. S. activists together and stand near where ever the delegation is located, wearing plain paper bags over our heads and holding signs that say, “Proud U. S. citizen ashamed of my government’s position on climate change.” That would get their attention!

Bob Morris Takes On COP 11 (edition 1)

Bob’s COP 11 Dispatch No. 1
Montreal, Dec. 1, 2005-12-02

From the northbound Adirondaker I looked across the broad, charging current of the Hudson to the low hardwood covered banks of the Palisades. The thick forest continued up the steep rock littered slopes at the base of the high cliffs before giving way to the sheer curtain of rock. The forest reappeared on the level cliff top like a hardwood sauce on a giant granite shortcake. Perhaps because of the unusually warm fall we have had, I caught occasional glimpses of the last bright yellows of fall here and there among the otherwise dun winter hue of dead leaves and bare trees this first day of December.

I was on my way to the laboriously named but lightly abbreviated Eleventh Council of Parties to the United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change (COP 11), so it was natural to muse on the impacts of climate disruption on those hardwoods. Because of the precipitous increase of carbon in the atmosphere due to burning prodigious quantities of gas, coal and oil over the past 160 years the delicate balance that has kept the biosphere stable has been upset. The climate has been pushed by that disruption into an increasing rapid rate of change, including short term extreme weather events and long term alteration of ocean currents, drought and flood cycles, duration and character of seasons. Changes that would otherwise occur over tens and even hundreds of thousands of years are being compressed into centuries and even decades.

Hardwoods don’t adapt all that quickly. As the band of cool, temperate weather with distinct seasons that supports them moves further north, the hardwoods are stuck in place by their long life cycles and slow growth patterns. The beetles and other insects that feed on the bark and trunks of the hardwoods have shorter life cycles and adapt quickly and well to warming temperatures and longer summers. They multiply, overwhelming the relatively static hardwood population. Southern species of pine also have shorter life cycles and adapt well to warmtnh, so they march up eastern North America far more rapidly than the hardwoods, overtaking and displacing them.

How long before we no longer enjoy the colorful and evocative annual cycles of the hardwood forests along the Hudson River and surrounding states? Already there is a noticeable decline in the maples that give autumn its bright reds. Every gallon of gas and shovelful of coal we burn gives another little push to accelerate these changes. On the other hand we can slow and even limit those changes with every gallon of gas and shovelful of coal that we prevent from burning by increasing the energy efficiency of our buildings, stretching the mileage of our cars, developing solar and wind power capacity, using trains or trolleys or bikes or walking instead of driving.

That is the message I am taking to Montreal and hoping to help spread among the decision makers at COP 11. The biggest obstacle to getting these decision makers to make firm plans that will protect our climate and save the hardwoods is the U. S. government. Our government’s plan is to just ask the carbon based industries and other s to develop new technologies and voluntarily “do the right thing” as long as it doesn’t hurt corporate profits. No one actually believes this will happen, but it serves the corporate agenda well by delaying any changes that will reduce the use of gas, coal and oil.

I don’t know how to get my message to the COP 11 decision makers, since I have never been to a conference of this sort. I will do my best to be heard, and you can help. If you will try to get decision makers at home, in schools, in businesses and in government to recognize the need to move to a new energy economy based on clean power and climate protection, then that will increase the chances that those of us in Montreal will be heard. The hardwoods can’t speak for themselves.